Today most organizations utilize the Internet for advertising their products, attracting prospective customers, engaging with current customers to solve their problems and even executing transactions over the wire. Security is a key concern during online transactions. Commercial Internet transactions, for example, Internet banking, credit card purchases, and the like are only as secure as the weakest link. Current online transaction risks increase due to constant attacks from cyber rookies and professionals alike. Typically, these attacks exploit vulnerabilities of existing computer communication protocols, as well as vulnerabilities of individual computers, such as web servers on a network.
There are general types of threats that are commonly launched against networked computers. One such type can be broadly classified as unauthorized access. Unauthorized access refers to a number of different attacks. The goal of these attacks is to access some resources that the computer would not normally provide to the attacker. Website defacement is a common example of the unauthorized access attacks. The website defacement is an attack on a website that changes the visual appearance of the site or a webpage. Once defaced, the website, or at least some of its pages, may no longer appear or function as originally designed. As a result, many associated damaging effects may occur such as, loss of business, reputation damages, legal entanglements—when transactions, reports filing and the like fail to be available. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important for many organizations to have a protection system that can detect any type of malicious data manipulation in a timely fashion.